Samsung Gear 360

[ Samsung ] What good is a 4K TV without 4K content? Same goes for VR (Virtual Reality). VR requires 360-degree videos and photos. Enter Samsung’s Gear 360. The Gear 360 sports two f/2.0 fisheye lenses — one in the front and the other in the back — that allow overlapping fields of view for a continuous 360-degree view of the environment. The two halves combine to form 360-degree 3840×1920 videos or 7776×3888 photos.

Samsung did a bang up job with the Gear 360; it looks fantastic: simple, elegant, and a few seconds after you see it you know what it’s for. The Gear 360 is dust- and splash-resistant.

Samsung and others are just getting going with VR, so VR capture and playback technologies still have imperfections to overcome. A key challenge is to fix image distortions at the seams. Perhaps when we start capturing light fields in 360?